Dead salmon study by Craig Bennett Essays - Neuroimaging

Dead salmon study by Craig Bennett Essays - Neuroimaging "Dead salmon study" by Craig Bennett What happened in the study? i.e the procedure Neuroscientist Craig Bennett purchased a whole Atlantic salmon, took it to a lab at Dartmouth, and put it into an fMRI machine used to study the brain. The fish sat in the scanner, they showed it "a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations." To maintain the rigor of the protocol, the salmon, just like a human test subject, "was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing." The salmon "was not alive at the time of scanning." 33978858382000What did the study show? i.e. the findings When they got around to analysing the voxel (think: 3-D or "volumetric" pixel) data, the voxels representing the area where the salmon's tiny brain sat showed evidence of activity. In the fMRI scan, it looked like the dead salmon was actually thinking about the pictures it had been shown. What the implications are for brain imaging research The result is completely nuts but that's actually exactly the point. Bennett, who is now a post-doc at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his adviser, George Wolford, wrote up the work as a warning about the dangers of false positives in fMRI data. They wanted to call attention to ways the field could improve its statistical methods. Researchers get up to 130,000 voxels from each set of scans they do of a brain. They have to comb all that data for signals that indicate something is happening in a particular region of the brain. The fMRI data has a lot of natural noise, though, and with the amounts of data generated in the work, chance can play some tricks.